50 Short Games by thecatamites (Game Club)

[thecatamites]

Hello my friends,

 

It's me, thecatamites. I haven't posted bc I figure it'd be offputting but I read + enjoy thread a lot :^) Thank you for writing about my tiny, dubious video games.

 

I post bc I've finally been able to work thru some tech problems re. porting of the marker games to HTML5 and am running through that. I plan to update the glorioustrainwreck posts en masse when I'm finished with them all but rather than force people here to download zip files unnecessarily I figure I post whatever the current week's game is ahead of time. Hopefully all be over soon.

 

Here is YardDoggz http://harmonyzone.org/Dev/MagPlan/YardDoggz/Yarddoggz.html

 

Good luck / I'm sorry

- Stephen

[clyde]

That sounds great. Thanks for telling us. 

It must be weird having people write about your games like this. Whether you post or not, I imagine that you are just dealing with that slight trauma. 

I should take thing moment to mention that the music in YardDoggz is oddly evokative of a certain mood for me. It evokes the sense of listening to solo horn-players, living in NewYork City in the 1970's. That doesn't make me think the game takes place there, but that fetch is happening right after watching The Conversation of Taxi Driver.

[Dinosaursssssss]

To me the simple music combined with the later shapes the player becomes (the one that looks kinda like a UFO wearing a cape and the 4/5 stars) made me think of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's something about the lack of rhythm or other instruments, I think. The music doesn't seem to change though and the player transformations seem to be looped on a timer so I don't know that that line of thinking is going anywhere.

[clyde]

I didn't know what to think about the transformations. It reminded me of Pink Zone by Porpentine.

http://aliendovecote.com/pinkzone.html

[ihavefivehat]

For me, the transformations felt like when you're just absentmindedly hanging out with your dog on an overcast fall day, which is the type of weather that makes me get lost in thought. And you just sort of start spacing out and getting caught up in different stories in your head. Meanwhile your dog clearly doesn't give a shit and just wants you to keep throwing the ball.

[clyde]

That interpretation works for me.

[clyde]

For the week of December 1st, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Wrath Of The Serpent by thecatamites

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here. 

[Dinosaursssssss]

I haven't played enough yet to have anything to say about the game but here's an ouroboros gif

 

(source)

[sergiocornaga]

the one that looks kinda like a UFO wearing a cape

 

Just putting it out there if thecatamites is still reading, I'd be really interested to know what this is actually supposed to be, if anything.

[thecatamites]

ah, they were all just aimless squiggles but that one (also the player character in Happy Astronaut City and probably some other robot-looking guys) were kind of based on how Gary Panter draws robots as like... squat boxes with crude eyes and teeth. here is closest example that comes to mind (the robot in bg, a recurring character in Jimbo In Hell/Purgatory)

 

[clyde]

I see Wrath Of The Serpent as being an attempt to create an icon of the positive feedback frustration of getting lost with your significant other. Two characters are controlled which makes me think the game is about a relationship more than an event. The text being pale blue and pale pink genders it for me. The ouroboros alludes to getting more and more annoyed as your partner and yourself blame each other for making it harder to deal with the obstacle at hand (eventually the two of you become the most difficult aspects for each other to deal with) when if both of you just stopped, then the majority of the frustration would have no fuel. Your frustration with the other is fueled by their frustration with you and vice-versa. Using an ancient symbol to frame this circumstance inflates the magnitude of the difficulty by suggesting that this tendency is archetypical (and prone to being explained with an appeal to nature). When I read the line about having pissed off the serpent, I begin to associate getting lost in heavy traffic on a hot day on the way to an urgent event, with Adam and Eve suddenly being outside the gates of Eden and blaming each other while trying to figure out where to go next.

Ultimately I find the depiction hopeful since this is not a game about your partner being a fuck-up; instead it's presented as the frustrating feedback-loop that couples are inevitably going to encounter at some point in their relationship. These occasions are notoriously difficult to see objectively and rationally. It's always kinda depressing to see relationships between individuals that can only see the situation emotionally and from their individual perspective because they will never manage to escape the cycle of spite. The perspective displayed here is evidence of the objectivity necessary to escape the cycle; we are looking at it rather than from it. 

[clyde]

For the week of December 8th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Tales of Terror by thecatamites

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here. 

[gamesthatexist]

YardDoggz is a simple little diorama where you play fetch with your dog. The most striking thing about it is the fall foliage. All brown, squiggly, but has a nice depth & variety, trees with leaves hanging on, bare limbs, brush, bushes, dead leaves, dirty ground, brown grass. I like how you can throw the ball and then sort of wander away from your dog as it tries to catch you. I like how you can, simultaneously, absentmindedly entertain the dog while you're exploring the world (in that very brief window where you haven't seen everything yet, my favorite part of the game, which lasts about ten seconds). This is the strength of a lot of these games. How they figure out how to juxtapose some mundane activity with the act of exploration in a way that elevates both, in a way that is often poetic, sometimes profound. YardDoggz is quiet, despite the blurting horns.

 

Wrath of the Serpent and Tales of Terror share a similar aesthetic that is unlike YardDoggz. YardDoggz looks like a colored pencil on otherwise blank canvas. The latter two look more like DOS games filled with MS Paint drawings, black backdrop with some garish colors on top, Carmen Sandiego-style environments. Wrath of the Serpent is striking for its limited sense of both control and perspective. At first you think the snake represents the outer limits of your vision, and you control something inside it. Then you realize you're actually moving the serpent around, and can only see through the serpent; it is your telescope. Then, you realize you're controlling both the limits of your perspective and also what's inside of it. What is inside of it? A garbled conversation of sorts. Representations of frustrated miscommunication. An angry-looking cartoon who is on the phone with someone he clearly does not want to be talking to. The sense of this character's frustration that stems from not being able to communicate successfully mirrors your own experience of looking in on these little fragments of meaning, brushing the serpent over the environment like a clumsy detective lookin for cluez. It feels something like asynchronous communication, except no it doesn't, it feels more like live communication over a distance, like Skypeing on slow internet. 

 

Tales of Terror is the most campy of this trio. YardDoggz isn't campy at all, kind of quiet and poetic, and Serpent is somewhere in between. In Tales of Terror you drive a fearsome vehicle up to a terrible castle and you delight in the screams of whoever they are in the castle. Your character looks like the infamous Murder Dog. Of the aforementioned three games, this one is the most aimless in the sense of what it's trying to do. The driving section serves as a great buildup and introduction to the castle, but then the castle interior is some half-hearted platforming, then a purgatory room at the end decorated only with a glib, white "thanks." YardDoggz and Serpent feel confident and self-contained. This one ran out of steam about half-way through. Just goes to show that it depends on the day, right?

[gamesthatexist]

For me, the transformations felt like when you're just absentmindedly hanging out with your dog on an overcast fall day, which is the type of weather that makes me get lost in thought. And you just sort of start spacing out and getting caught up in different stories in your head. Meanwhile your dog clearly doesn't give a shit and just wants you to keep throwing the ball.

 

From the author's notes:

 

The player character's sprite morphing as the game progreses was vaguely meant to represent the absent ebb and flow of thoughts when you wander around a park.

[clyde]

Tales of Terror initially reminds me of B movies from the 1970's and 80's where young fertile people live in fear of a killer behind the wheel. I never watched any of them in full-length, but I got the impression from a few minutes of those movies that the car itself was seen as a ruthless serial killer. These movies existed on television at a time when the idea of running pedestrains over for points was a running joke. Typically, point-values were assigned to maximize disregard for socially accepted norms. Children, elderly folk, and those who were visibly handicapped were often cited as being worth "more points" because they are seen as something harmless or worthy of protection. 

 

The main thing I get out of Tales of Terror is the movement from high-intensity aesthetic and gameplay towards complete impotence. When watching the killer-car movies, one finds themselves asking two questions to make the horror absurd: "Why doesn't everyone just stay inside?" and "Where is the car going in the first place?". The arrival in Tales of Terror is a defeat in itself. On the way to the castle, the player is encouraged to feel a deranged furvor and violence in running over as many people as possible. Once the killer car arrives and goes indoors, things become a bit akward as the car must jump on platforms, suggesting that the setting is now indoors. Performing the act that came so easily before is clumsy and stilited by the walls and divisions of space. Then you are presented with an empty room that says "Thanks" at what appears to be a dead-end. Arrival is the night-of-road-slaughter's ultimate demise.

[clyde]

For the week of December 15th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Operative Assailant by thecatamites

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here. 

[clyde]

Some bullshitter once told me that if a mountain remains untouched by people, a stone will set at its peak that is an exact replica of the mountain itself. That's what Operative Assailants is to me. It is a set of games within a game much like 50 Short Games is a set  of games that share a certain something. If I had the motivation to do so, I could write my thoughts on each one of the operatives (or are they assailants?). But I've been wanting to write about the collection-aspect itself and this will make for a good practice round. 

What is the power of a collection? I'm working on a secret game right now. If you are participating in the Klik & Klaus: Sekret Santa Klub 2014 on Glorious Trainwrecks, you are not allowed to read this until the 25th of December: 

I'm currently working on a game that is pretty much exquisite-corpse poetry, popularized by refrigerator magnets. This means that I've been cutting out a shit-load of words an phrases from magazines for the past week. Here, I'll put one up.

 

 

This one has contents from a western history of art book from the 1960's, a recent National Geographic, and a Shutterfly catalog.

The reason I'm telling you this is so I can explain what you start to realize from cutting evokative words out of magazines for multiple hours. National Geographic uses a distinct vocabulary, as does Shutterfly-catalogues and books on the history of western art written in the 1960's. Books, or bounds, are collections whose words and images aren't glued together and homogenous exclusively by explicit argument and chronological narrative; they are tied together mostly by voice and nearness.  National Geographic is obsessed with words like Worlds and explore. They also measure everything's height in statues-of-liberties. The Shutterfly-catalogue struggles to expand its vocabulary beyond 40 or so words; it tends to use words like make, create, personalize, and gift. A LOT. The history of western art book turns into a straight up history-book once it gets within forty years of its printing-date. When it covers the subjects that predate the 1920's  it uses culture, intellectual, civilization, progress, and empire on pretty much every page. It's not the subject matter that skewers the book so much as the vocabulary chosen by the author's intent. 

 

 

Operative Assailants and 50 Short Games do the same, but its important to consider not only the coalescing characteristics of a collection, but also its ability to stretch. What does a collection of games or scenarios supply that an individual does not (especially in reference to the digital game-medium)? There are more subtle uses of multiple perspectives than a straight up Rashomon-effect. We can feel the broadening of a fiction from permutation of angles without establishing a full synergetic systems-understanding. The best thing about Operative Assailants and 50 Short Games is that it accomplishes this so expertly while appearing goofy, casual, and effortless. Pete manages to get over his fears and draw up enough courage to face danger so bravely, that he will finally be able to prove that he belongs on the team of operative assailants. Meanwhile Car-Car exhibits the non-chalant priviledge that claims of nepotism amongst the crew have decried, by driving past Mogey's failed suicide-bombing. It's a whole system of this humor. The failure is on a management-level. 

 

These asunder events and narratives drawn by the marker of the same author don't legitimize their irrelevance and dispersal through an eventual Fate-suction possible only by the corralling of an all-powerful author, but instead imply an inherent solidarity by failing or non-eventing in their own separate areas. It's fucking brilliant and quite a relief to be honest.

[clyde]

For the week of December 22nd, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Sea Of Love by thecatamites

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here. 

[gamesthatexist]

I know we’re here to talk about 50SG (and am aware that I’m a couple behind as usual), but I want to interrupt and drop in some hopefully relevant close reading. I’ve been working on a new piece for Arcade Review and re-reading the A1 Reviews archive for inspiration (A1 is a sort of fictional character written by thecatamites doomed to write game reviews) and reeling over how exquisite the prose is. This is the kind of writing that is way too good, but it somehow makes me want to write more instead of making me never want to write again. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic when I say that these lil' micro-reviews keep blowing my mind (plz excuse my noxious triple-A phraseology) every time I look back over them.

 

There is something ineffable about the A1 character - this writer that seems to have been swallowed up by traditional game review consumer culture. Here the qualities of reviews you might find at hardcoregaming101 are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, but that’s not the whole shtick. The character slips in and out of these sublime theoretical tangents that tend to zoom out and give you a bird’s eye view of games as ridiculous, horrible cultural assemblages, and the writing itself seems to be an elaborate performance of this culture. Let me try to find a good example. How bout the first one?

 

GAME REVIEW: A BANJO-KAZOOIE LEVEL, RARE, 19XX

”[..]he unfastened his wristwatch and scrambled the setting, then slipped it into his pocket. Making his way out to the car park he refected on the freedom this simple act gave him. He would explore the lateral byways now, the side doors, as it were, in the corridors of time.”
Hypothetical complement to thinking about strange video game spaces would be strange video game time, how it’s represented and how it’s perceived. Chopped up, sped up, deferred, halted, looped and reloaded, cross-sectioned across menus and SHOP screens or projected flatly across static locations, happening tangentially to player experience or else too close to it like the unnerving seasonal events in Animal Crossing. the ballard quote above works by applying the language of nonlinear space to time, in a way not unlike rpgs using continuity of event and dialogue with your own ingame activities to provide the illusion of continuous time to the modular network of frozen cities that flicker past in the background (not the least unnerving part of Ghosts Of Aliens was the sense of crawling across a huge, flat, essentially static drawing of a world and being totally dissociated from any of the cool events depicted therein, like writhing around on a big painting while fighting snails). 100 HOURS OF GAMEPLAY is a threat rather than a promise. Where do they go? Where do 100 hours spent reading the internet go? Chattering dissociated microevent chains plugging straight into the unconscious. If people talk too much about the things they played as a kid part of it could be that those experiences can only be understood retroactively. Psychic filter removes the hours of haltingly progressing through dialogue trees and turn-based battles, breaks down the original thing into a collage that makes more sense but which crucially still relies on the artificial reference points of meaning and context that got hammered monotonously into yr brain like nails through a pine board over long hours in front of a teevee.

 

See how A1 uses the premise of a game review to talk not about the specific game alluded to in the title but about something else entirely that the ominous premise of Game Review brings to the surface? How the looping, swerving sentences ignore a lot of conventional wisdom about writing style and in doing so manage to mirror the mental process involved in teasing out an abstract idea? How the wild simile is tucked away inside a deceptively modest parenthetical? These sentences don’t just make you need to read them again, they make you want to read them again.

 

The A1 character is highly attentive to its role as a fictional construct:

 

GAME REVIEW: GASSY CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE WEIRDO, RAGNAR, 20XX

[ed. note: A1 Reviews was hospitalised in the course of writing this review due to terrific brain lesions. What follows are his unedited and hysterical notes.]

1. Meaningless vermin experiences have potential to exist outside of the economy of sensation by which time is strategically invested in things so as to optimise profit in either enjoyment or knowledge; a process which transforms the raw matter of life / perception into a kind of uniform casino chip, worthwhile only as means to an end! Purposeless and scrappy things can only trade one kind of equivalently valueless experience for another and thus highlight being as an act in itself rather than a kind of empty space to be filled with other things. This is why it’s important to leave the house. If finding a value in these experiences is therefore a contradiction in terms it also highlights more ways in which they differ from canonical culture: distintegrate when they’re touched like bubbles.

 

The character seems deeply troubled by this inexplicable overbearing obligation to spend so many hours getting through video games in order to review them, and often gets distracted from them in order to project neurotic obsession to detail and mysterious urge to sound like advertisements onto other outlets:

 

Proposed revision to opening paragraph of the wikipedia article on hands (“The human hand is a wonderful object with a variety of uses”) rejected due to partisan language.

 

The joke points to the paradoxical consumer demand that game reviews be written in an 'unbiased' tone, even as the game review apparatus largely functions as advertising copy for a couple of monolithic companies. You must sell me the human hand, but you may not do this by explicitly telling me that you like the human hand. Instead, you must do so subtly, by detailing the number of curves, digits, wrinkles, and creases in said hand so that I may make an informed but not unduly influenced decision on the matter. Man, is this what it takes to make theory fun to read? Surely not, or people wouldn’t still be talkin’ about all the top theorists. But still, I think there’s something in this character that is attuned to the anti-intellectualism that can be a part of internet cultures, as if playing this character allows the writing to go in directions it wouldn’t otherwise for fear of seeming smug or self-serving. This must be part of why I like the character so much, for the way it captures and deflects the insecurities of seeming pretentious. There are moments when A1 hits on this sublime theorizing thread only to pull back and retreat to the relative safety of a kind of pulpy slapstick:

 

GAME REVIEW: HANGLY-MAN, HANGLY-MAN SOFTWARE CO., 19XX

a lot of the same people who would dismiss ”naive realism” in video game graphics also spend their time arguing for similarly idealised and fictitious representations of human time and causality. detailed and exciting narratives you can shape but also step outside of at any given moment to grab a beer or equivalent, monuments to choice that you can still look back on with the detachment that comes of not really belonging to the world in which it occured. miniaturised visions of completion and enclosure in lives that remain contingent and mostly devoid of any liberating objective vantage point. maybe it’s a good thing, a teachable thing, these fictional worlds where you can get totally invested in the decisions you’re making before it winds down to creditscreen acting as a kind of regressive lesson in the right way to think about your own experiences. but more & more i feel attracted to things which don’t try to break down the contrast between fiction and real life so much as amplify it to a ridiculous and offputting degree that emphasises the ridiculous and contradictory impulses involved. “liberated from the tyranny of being useful”. the monumental self-absorbtion of final fantasy games which play out on a timeframe basically antagonistic to any kind of human life or thought. is this how the dinosaurs felt? 80hr chocobo subquest. i age and die while the hangly man continues gobbling up those dots and the sociopathic mercenary teens from a square enix game are still running around a field searching for red crystal. they’ll keep doing it forever. put the savefile on a disc, put the disc into a sealed container, fire the container to the moon, to make sure that the sociopathic mercenary teenagers are still complaining about insignificant shit after you’ve passed on or given up on dealing with these worlds. embrace gap between visions of banal chattering infinity and the fleeting nature of your own experience and perceptions. that this contrast in some perverse way can be used to maintain your awareness of the stakes involved. the dying soul and the immortal animal. folders full of roms that you can never play in a single lifetime. use the fixity of corporate icons to gauge your own continuing sink through the muck. eat what you kill. face to bloodshed. did you know the “hangly” in hangly-man is a corruption of “hungry”? right on.

hangly man: 40 star

 

The meaningless arbitrary number of stars at the end of each review caps off the transition from genuinely grappling with meaning to descending back into nonsensical rubrics of 'objective' game review speak. Sometimes it moves in the opposite direction, starting with uncanny advertising copy and using this mode as a shovel to dig down to the deeper stuff:

 

GAME REVIEW: MASTERS OF DOOM, DAVID KUSHNER, 2003

masters of doom is a book about the game Doom by id software and how it was developed and by whom. it’s fun and readable, there’s lots of good detail on that john and that john carmack and interesting stories of the video game generation culture of the late eighties. floppydisks sold in ziplock bags and magazines filled with printed code to plug in ‘n’ play at home. it’s a very inspiring story about some enthusiastic young people as they “make a go of it” - they eat pizza! they make friends! they listen to dokken! - that gets more sombre as the team begins to fall apart. did money change them? well, you have to read it to find out. as in many art biographies the actual game of Doom doesn’t so much emerge from this record so much as overlay it strangely, an invisible structuring influence that the narrative circles around. stories of young technology wizkids having adventures and pulling in the dough share space with brief asides describing the bizarre imaginary architecture, computer brutality mazes, flashing lights and secret tunnels that make up their accomplishment. the fact that this is a true story does never quite reduce the sensation of glimpsing some monstrous parable.

MASTERS OF DOOM: 100 STARS

 

Undeniably this performance makes the thoughts more fun to read, but how much is it a necessary part of the entire effect? And for how many readers does this actually work well? The imagined audience that I picture for this website is some ghost floating through the internet ether, stumbling over wires of broken hyperlinks. There is an attention to language here that makes me think of someone who is willing to read not just good but bad sentences twenty times over and relish both types equally. Take a look at this careful, bittersweet explication of some writer that I’ve never heard of:

 

SELECTED STORIES, ROBERT WALSER, 1878-1956

The sentimental is a sensation of being imbued with some of the static and assured character we ascribe to other people’s lives. The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with ones role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside. I think Robert Walser’s prose voice is that of someone deeply fascinated by this image of community and deeply doubtful of his own right to participate in it. He uses cliches constantly - every woman is “undoubtably charming”, every landscape is “exceptionally beautiful” - and with a genuine relish, as if overwhelmed and delighted by the confident sureness of each phrase
“If I now exclaim in a booming voice ‘Natureleh!’ - I have in mind the artist of aviation who, with an energy to be wondered at, flew across the ocean; and of course I number myself among the innumerable people who revere this happy dominator of difficulties.” Look at the strange, contorted syntax of this sentence, the way it almost bends double on itself to accomodate more happy adjectives, so that a pilot becomes an artist of aviation, revered by not just people but by innumerable people. It doesn’t gel; the slight meaning of the sentence loops strangely around the grand phrases, like a stream through boulders; there’s a mixture of the dolorous and the discomfited which lingers throughout all his works, a kind of ambiguous catch in the voice talking on autopilot. The opening lines to his story “Nervous”:

“I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes. I am sinking and drying up a little. I am a bit scalded and scorched, yes, yes. That’s what it does to you. That’s life. I am not old, not in the least, certainly I am not eighty, by no means, but I am not sixteen any more either. Quite definitely I am a bit old and used up. That’s what it does to you. I am decaying a little, and I am crumbling, peeling a little. That’s life.”

Grinding, chattering, circling, the rote words, hastily modified, the string of declaratives, overshadowed by adjectives that seem to stand apart from the text as a whole, that have to be juxtaposed and reiterated and taken back and put forward again in order to express anything at all, like a binary chain of tiny, exhausting affirmations and negations trying to approximate something more complex, squirming, like on a hook.
Walser’s short stories are for the most part entirely lacking in characters, dramatic situations, or discernible structure - there are exceptions but the form I associate most with him is that of the brief, essayistic nothing, in which a trivial fragment of anecdote, argument or narrative is brought up only to be nearly immediately overwhelmed by digressions, doubts, elaborate description, self-mockery and excuses before being quietly dropped again after maybe a page. Bold statements are hurled down, tactfully modified, drawn out while the author acknowledges the respectable possibility of contrary sentiments being held by the intelligent and unredoubtable reader, and finally retracted. Sentences, paragraphs, pages that seem to exist only to politely extinguish themselves, silently imploding, every trace of meaning hunted down and graciously annihilated.
“We don’t need to see anything special. We already see so much.” is a quote that the critics favour for containing the essence of Walser the scrappy miniaturist and outsider artist. I think it can be read a different way, in the context of works that frequently feel overwhelmed and crushed by an intrusive yet irreproachable weight - of language, of nature, of everyday experience, crowding out thought and being. The strange collapsing structure of the stories suggest a world where nothing is too small to annihilate us.

Robert Walser can be found in all good electronic stores, he has 12 levels and comes with a cloth map of nowhere in particular. You wouldn’t know it from reading this but he’s the funniest writer I know.

ROBERT WALSER: A MODERATE AND CERTAINLY NOT UNDULY EXCESSIVE YET STILL EMINENTLY RESPECTABLE 5 BILLION STARS

 

!!!!! holy shit.

 

The writing also betrays a consistent fondness for metaphor and simile, and with these techniques I don’t get the same sense of the writer pulling back as I get with the theory stuff. These moments somehow seem less self-conscious and recursive. The above “like a stream through boulders” and "like on a hook" are  good examples, but also:

 

music slipping and sliding on the edge of buzzing insect soundworlds delights and unnerves me, like leaning in close to hear someone talking and having them blow a raspberry instead, sudden intrusion of social world by the material presence behind it, gorilla jumps from wardrobe.

 

Part of what makes these reviews work is this vast sense of distance, the way they’re all piled up as a txt. file in some dusty archive with no extra formatting to make them look good. The words do all the work. It looks like the abandoned website of some 90s teen who was really into modernist literature. I think a lot of these prose ticks come from the modernists, but it’s hard to say because the writing does such a job of mingling loquacious style (marathon clause tangents and liberal usage of commas and dashes) with a pulp sensibility (hyperbolic characterizations, self-deprecation, and equal reverence for ‘bad’ and ‘good’ writing). Well, that’s about it. Thank you, and I’m sorry.

 

A1 REVIEWS: 88 STARS

[gamesthatexist]

The reason I'm telling you this is so I can explain what you start to realize from cutting evokative words out of magazines for multiple hours. National Geographic uses a distinct vocabulary, as does Shutterfly-catalogues and books on the history of western art written in the 1960's. Books, or bounds, are collections whose words and images aren't glued together and homogenous exclusively by explicit argument and chronological narrative; they are tied together mostly by voice and nearness.  National Geographic is obsessed with words like Worlds and explore. They also measure everything's height in statues-of-liberties. The Shutterfly-catalogue struggles to expand its vocabulary beyond 40 or so words; it tends to use words like make, create, personalize, and gift. A LOT. The history of western art book turns into a straight up history-book once it gets within forty years of its printing-date. When it covers the subjects that predate the 1920's  it uses culture, intellectual, civilization, progress, and empire on pretty much every page. It's not the subject matter that skewers the book so much as the vocabulary chosen by the author's intent.

 

This is really interesting, and I think it also speaks to an important point about 50SG and the trainwreck culture in which it participates. At risk of stating the obvious, there's an overbearing sense in game review culture that a single video game is supposed to contain a world. Advertising copy suggests that this world should be exhausting and inexhaustible, a sufficient alternative to living your own life. A game should contain its own discourse and vocabulary--you start playing and learn its vocabulary, but that's not enough. The expectation is that you'll spend at least ten or twenty or so more hours (and many more for the big rpgs) reinforcing your fluency to the point where you can set yourself apart from the uninitiated. Of course, even big triple-A games exist within larger discourses, genres rigidly defined by particular formal conventions (shoot man in head, jump towards platform), but there's always some twist, some new thing that is supposed to sell the game as containing a discourse that is entirely its own. The trainwreck games, chopped up and pasted together, reproduce this process at a rapid pace in a way that both trivializes all of the reference points involved but also brings the fragments to the surface and highlights them as interesting in their own right, rejecting the premise that discourse mastery should be an involved, emotionally rigorous process of losing yourself in some twitchy hyperreal universe. Instead, discourse and vocabulary should be rapidly fluctuating, accessible but changing faster than any one person could keep up with, churning out references at such a rapid pace as to render them almost empty but at the same time eerily evocative of something outside their origins, something that can't be contained in any individual cultural object.

[clyde]

 The imagined audience that I picture for this website is some ghost floating through the internet ether, stumbling over wires of broken hyperlinks. There is an attention to language here that makes me think of someone who is willing to read not just good but bad sentences twenty times over and relish both types equally. Take a look at this careful, bittersweet explication of some writer that I’ve never heard of:

 

Tychocelchuuu recommended A1 Reviews a while back and I never got around to read them. Seeing some of these excerpts has convinced me that I've been missing out. This is really good stuff and informative about the sensibility from which 50 Short Games was made. I love the style of writing that you describe so well in the above quotation. 

 

The trainwreck games, chopped up and pasted together, reproduce this process at a rapid pace in a way that both trivializes all of the reference points involved but also brings the fragments to the surface and highlights them as interesting in their own right, rejecting the premise that discourse mastery should be an involved, emotionally rigorous process of losing yourself in some twitchy hyperreal universe. Instead, discourse and vocabulary should be rapidly fluctuating, accessible but changing faster than any one person could keep up with, churning out references at such a rapid pace as to render them also empty and at the same time eerily evocative of something outside their origins, something that can't be contained in any individual cultural object.

 

A tendency I notice (and enjoy) is the way the initial moments of learning a game's systems is leveraged for player-engagement similar to that of instinctual survival. A good example of this is the subject of our recent conversation over Twitter about American Baseball. By the time you figure out how to play, you have had some time to build up a sense of responsibility for your performance and suspicions about how much that performance matters, and  you have no warmup-round within which to tease out. So you find yourself onstage trying to do the best that you can. The WarioWare games and Revenge of the Sunfish do this, but because they involve multiple games in quick succession, the player has no time to digest what just happened. the inexplicable regret of failure I experienced after my first playthrough of 2hrs 1man show was interesting in a different way than my eventual successful playthroughs where the game became awkward because I couldn't really end it. The trainwrecks tend to feel either super-short or exhausted when I play them and I agree; those inherent qualities of the tools and culture that you speak of seem to surface more easily within that spectrum. 

 

 

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Sea of Love

 

After a few dissatisfied playthroughs, the title lended meaning in a rather obtuse manner. I began to see the game as an explicit and clumsy metaphor representing the process of being alone and attempting to find romance. Added to that, the method represented was depressingly acquiescent; I got the sense that the highs of romantic fancy and the lows of repeated discontent with willing partners had averaged out into this routine of just showing up, saying the right things and waiting to see what you already know, that they are boring or possibly a bit entertaining. And then you do it again. In this reading, I found it interesting that you didn't play as a fish in the sea-of-love seeing how many other fish there are. The circumstances presented seemed like a paradoxical existence where the player-character doesn't believe the platitudinal advice on love will work, but has to make some effort, and this repeatitious grind that pays off little (at most) is the only perceived option.

 

 

The other day I was telling a friend of mine who is actively disinterested in games about 50 Short Games and the immediate comparison I came up with was 69 Love Songs. Sea of Love has managed to make that comparison much more concrete. Sea of Love is not remotely a game about love. It's a game about love-games, which are very far away from anything to do with love.

 

[gamesthatexist]

OPERATIVE ASSAILANTS: Clyde’s right, the problem with these operatives is totally on a management level, and I’ve got some questions that need answering. Why did management neglect to train workers in the proper utilization of Grav-O-Boot’s in zero-G field? Why didn’t someone realize that UFO was stationed too far away to notice anything useful? I’ll admit it was a good move sending Robo into a base where it is very hard to distinguish robots from background environment, but why send Robo into shooter game where Robo is sure to be destroyed? Whose decision was it to name Car-Car twice? Who dropped Pete’s key behind those spikes? Why are we wasting time with a Mogey cameo appearance? This is an important mission! Why do we expect assemblages of disparate forms to make coherent statements? Why did we ever subscribe to auteur theory? Is it possible to work outside of artistic conventions developed for purposes of commodification? Can act of interpretation be separated from rhetorical performance of making overbearing arguments aspiring to a singularity of meaning? Why doesn’t Socratic method work in schoolz? “Brainlord, we need your brains to infiltrate the base! Understood.” Note the repetition in this dialogue that mirrors the absurd redundancy of someone named “Brainlord” receiving instructions from management. Brainlord is clearly unsatisfied with workplace environment. The Synderblok plan was brilliant. I have no complaints. Synderblok’s greatest obstacle was fate. There’s this vague sense of collective agenda without any sense of what anyone should actually be doing to work towards that agenda. I like how the commander is too insecure to lead, and how the hub world/menu is the most promising and overwhelming part of the game. Once you get into each character you only have a few seconds to anticipate the dead end. Video game as bloated task force committee, as entrenched obstacle course of incompetence contrived on the bureaucratic level.   

[gamesthatexist]

SEA OF LOVE: Liking the dreamy haze of this one, the pink waves and beaches accompanied by whining lower register synth loop (significant bc usually the audio loops are shrill, slightly grating) cradling a lonely house. I think my favorite part might be the sluggish, lapping water. The labyrinthine cave mixed with the trial-and-error jrpg battles are cute and unobtrusive, but they feel fairly aimless, and this particular ecosystem maybe doesn’t need more than one monster type (it might actually be more poignant if it was just you and one other in this lonesome little world). But at the same time it’s relaxing walking up to each different monster just to see what each one looks like (you can easily avoid ones you’ve already visited), and see what each one likes, as opposed to the way battles function in most games as a kind of rote mechanized labor. The reward screen is effectively mysterious, a sharp little jingle, a cube with an eyeball. There is some differentiation of the awards for each monster, but I can't recall them clearly. This feels not quite fully realized, but in a nice way. Video game as half-expressed sigh, sleepy, suspended.

 

I don't think it's always helpful to include author's notes, but here I think they are warranted:

 

Sea Of Love is a dating game inspired by the Pokemon series (specifically the areas Power Station, Mewtwo's Ice Dungeon I think I conflated). You walk around the little beach and go into a cave. You meet the animals and can seduce them via fruit. If successful they become "tamed" and sing a song to you. I had originally intended for the "tamed" animals to be added to your house on the beach but was too tired to implement this and also it seemed a bit pat (do we always kill the ones we love?? Can love bloom on the battlefield??). In terms of other content that didn't make it in, the encounter bits were going to be more interesting and also there was an excellent anemonae monster as well… with respect to the pokemon connection, originally this was going to be a more regular cave-based monster dating game but I felt that explicitly conflating romance with navigating a cavern full of leering underground slime monsters was too psychologically revealing and so the dating parts warped into a more general music / battlin' thing.

I should add that another reason I stripped back the dating elements was because I was wary of contributing to the misogynist tradition of representing femininity (as depicted here by sea monsters with long eyelashes, I guess) as something salty, slippery, protoplasmic, preverbal, a ghastly suckingness. See "Creamerz" for one I didn't catch in time.

[clyde]

 a cube with an eyeball

 

I interpreted this as a soggy loaf of bread.

[clyde]

For the week of December 29th, 2014 we will be playing:

 

Nasty by thecatamites

 

 

You can play the game in your browser here.

You can download the single game from here for free 

Or you can buy the entire collection of 50 games from here.